﻿I found I could only open 52 windows in Vista if in Aero. Each of window ate 2--5MB memory.

Interesting.

Is it just me or does anybody else find criticisms like this pretty crazy? I mean, I'm a graphics guy, coder, blogger, reader, etc...and I can't imagine ever having 52 windows opened...especially now that we have tabbed-browsing....

Right now I have 7 websites opened in one window (7 tabs), two email clients, 1 RSS reader, 2 folders, and msn messenger...and I actually feel cluttered

﻿ It's not crazy, it's measuring the performance. It's engineering. It's testing and QA. It's geeky. It's the kind of thing I'd think a company like MS would look for in employees. YMMV.

I agree that it's not crazy. I agree that it's geeky.

But, it's not the kind of thing MS would look for in its employees.

I'd say that, more than other companies I've worked with, MS looks for some degree of critical thinking.

When reading the comment, I could only wonder...

- What's the hardware setup?

- Is this a default install of Vista?

- Is there anything running in the background that might impact performance?

- What are the bottlenecks (other than limited memory)?

And, most importantly perhaps:

- 52 windows of what? "Window" is not, as far as I can remember, a standard metric by which we measure performance. Is it just 52 instances of the same app, or did he open different apps? Did he actually profile each "window" to get those numbers,
or is he guessing by doing some really dodgy math?

It's not engineering or testing - it's just one step above kicking the tires of a car to determine how well the whole thing works.

Engineering is a process which supposedly relies on the application of science (as in: the scientific method). There's nothing scientific about this.

Or, I should say, we don't have nearly enough data for these numbers to be useful.

It's like saying, "I was able to fit 52 fruits in my pocket!"

Well, what kind of fruit? How big is your pocket?

That's actually a simpler issue, but it demonstrates how far we are from being able to use this 52 window post to determine anything meaningful.

This would never fly at Microsoft. It wouldn't fly at anyplace I've ever done any work - not even the least technical of them all.

Without even knowing anything about Windows, to say nothing of Vista or any other particular flavor, someone with decent critical thinking skills could easily tear test results like this apart.